Brewster Ranch: The Land Report 2024 Deal of the Year

On October 24, 2024, the Texas General Land Office, under Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, acquired Brewster Ranch on behalf of the state’s $57 billion Permanent School Fund. At 353,785 acres, about 552 square miles of Big Bend country in Far West Texas, it was the largest ranch sale in the United States that year. The $164.6 million purchase was the largest single transaction in the Greater Big Bend Ecosystem since 1943, when Texas gifted Big Bend State Park to the federal government. The Land Report named it the 2024 Deal of the Year.

Brewster Ranch was never a single ranch. Brad Kelley assembled it over more than two decades from dozens of historic ranches, with scores of headquarters, hunting camps, airstrips, and hundreds of miles of ranch roads, including pioneering ranches once owned by Alfred Gage and Asa Jones. “I call Brad ‘the antifragmentation machine,’” James King told The Land Report. “Brad bought historic ranches that had been divvied up and aggregated them into much larger properties.”

Harrison King gave the holding its name, and he and James shared the listing, an ever evolving project that grew and changed as parts were sold and new ones were bought. At its height, Brewster Ranch totaled 422,952 acres. “We started with ‘just’ 117,000 acres,” Harrison said.

“You just can’t believe how beautiful it is,” Commissioner Buckingham said after touring the ranch by helicopter with James. “There are canyons, ravines, and places that are so remote that few people have even seen them in the past 100 years.”

In The Land Report’s words, the sale permanently protects 552 square miles of untamed Old West country, so that the Big Bend remains the same as when Spanish explorers first saw it centuries ago.